Obama: "All the Choices We've Made Have Been the Right Ones"Guy Benson Political Editor, Townhall.com

President Obama opened himself up for ridicule in late 2009 by unwisely obliging an interviewer who asked him to assess his job performance using a grade-school metric. Obama infamously awarded himself "a solid B+" for his efforts. When the president was confronted with a similar question from ABC News' Jake Tapper yesterday, he rectified his previous misstep -- at least temporarily:

Tapper: What grade would you give yourself?

Obama: Well, you know I'm not going to give myself a grade.

Tapper: Not even a midterm?

Obama: Other than "incomplete" because the work that we started is not yet done...

An "incomplete" or a "that's for the American people to decide" are the only correct answers in that situation. The trouble with Obama, though, is that his prodigious ego prevents him from sustaining even a front of feigned humility for too long. Indeed, we're talking about a man who wrote two autobiographies before the age of 50. Later in the exchange with Tapper, Obama rolled out this startling boast about his administration:

"I guarantee it's going to be a close election because the economy is not where it wants to be and even though I believe all the choices we've made have been the right ones, we're still going through difficult circumstances."

All the choices, Mr. President? All of them? What about...

The choice to appoint multiple tax cheats to your cabinet, including your current Treasury Secretary?

The choice to keep insisting on closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, even though the public opposes this prospect -- which was repeatedly blocked by a Democratic Congress?

The choice to throw a lavish birthday party for yourself, replete with a barefoot Conga line through the White House, as the threat of a national credit downgrade cast a shadow over the country.

The choice to file a lawsuit against Arizona's law that authorizes state and local officials to help the federal government fulfill its woefully unfulfilled responsibilities -- and that your Attorney General admitted he'd never read, even as he publicly denounced it.

The choice to include two provisions -- 1099 reform and the CLASS Act -- in your unpopular healthcare bill that are so unaffordable and unworkable that your own administration has since abandoned them.

The choice of your Justice Department to file a lawsuit to overturn a small North Carolina town's democratically-enacted decision to eliminate party identifications from municipal election ballots, arguing that African-Americans need "D" and "R" labels to determine whom to support.

The choice to sell your failed $800 Billion "stimulus" package as a means to spur "shovel ready" projects -- projects you later joked weren't quite so shovel ready after all.

The choice to appoint a self-described "Communist" who signed a 9/11 Truther petition as your "Green Jobs Czar."

The choice to alienate our greatest ally -- Great Britain -- by rudely disposing of a Winston Churchill bust, bestowing the Queen with an iPod filled with your own speeches, giving the former Prime Minister a gift that literally did not work on his own soil, and signaling neutrality over the Falkland Islands.

The choice to authorize, or at least ignore, a federal program that permitted 2,000 guns to "walk" into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, by design, resulting in countless murders -- including a US border patrol agent.

The choice to attempt to freeze out a legitimate news organization you viewed as inconveniently adversarial, a ploy that enraged the entire press corps.

The choice of your Justice Department to not pursue civil rights cases involving alleged minority offenders, and to drop an already-won, open-and-shut voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther party.

The choice to insist on granting mega-terrorists like Khalid Sheik Muhammad with civilian trials in New York City, over loud objections from Congress, city officials, and the public.

The choice to offend our greatest Middle Eastern ally -- Israel -- by extending shoddy treatment to its Prime Minister, and making provocative statements about preconditions for basic Israeli security.

The choice to revisit redundant and political investigations into the US intelligence community, over public objections from a bipartisan group of former CIA director, and despite low morale at the agencies that keep Americans safe.

The choice to introduce Stimulus 2.0 in a politically-timed Joint Session speech, knowing full well it would never pass either chamber of Congress.

The choice to travel the countryside, supposedly selling a plan to create US jobs, in foreign-made buses.

The choice to foist an expensive, failed mortgage bailout program upon the public -- which exacerbated moral hazard issues and actually "added to housing woes," according to the New York Times.

The choice to fast-track a half-billion dollar federal loan to a now-bankrupt solar energy company, a move even your own advisors repeatedly warned against.

The choice to demagogue and reject two separate pieces of legislation that would have placed the country on a path to solvency, and that would have averted the first US credit downgrade in history.

The choice to offer US support to the illegitimate, far-Left leader of Honduras, even as his small country struggled to retain its democracy.

The choice to produce a 2012 budget that increased the national debt by nearly $10 Trillion over a decade, ignored virtually all your own commission's recommendations for entitlement reform, raised taxes by $2 trillion, and was generally viewed as so surreally irresponsible that it was defeated unanimously in the Democrat-held Senate.

The choice to sit idly by while anti-American dictators ranted against our country, later expressing gratitude that they didn't blame you, specifically, for events that occurred when you were very young.

The choice to compare AIG executives to suicide bombers for receiving bonuses that your own administration wrote into the 2009 stimulus bill.

The choice to golf, golf, golf as federal efforts languished throughout the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The choice to lie about what scientific experts said, in order to pursue your anti-offshore drilling agenda.

The choice to introduce a litany of sanitized descriptors into our national security lexicon, from "man-caused disasters" to "overseas contingency operations."

The choice of your Vice President to kowtow to Communist China, flatly stating that he understood, and "wouldn't question," that country's hideous one-child policy.

The choice to schedule troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan along a transparently political timeline, in the face of strenuous opposition from top military commanders.

The choice to ignore the legal analysis of Pentagon attorneys and your own Office of Legal Counsel in order to maintain the US intervention in Libya, which was not approved by Congress.

The choice to offer an apology to Japan for the use of overwhelming, devastating US force to finally end World War II in the Pacific theater, a plan so groveling and unnecessary that Japanese aborted the idea.

The choice of your State Department to extend "condolences" to the family of a terrorist killed in a US strike.

President Obama evidently looks at this list of choices and thinks, perfection. As it happens, the American people have a big choice of their own on the horizon. We'll see whether their performance review is quite as generous as the president's. Feel free to augment my list of cosmically "right" Obama choices in the comments section.

Another half billion in tax payer guaranteed money. Another company run by Democratic donors and supporters. And another company that has labored long and hard and produced...a lemon. Network news catches on to what AT wrote about yesterday.

ABC News:

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland.

"There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," the car company's founder and namesake told ABC News. "They don't exist here."

Henrik Fisker said the U.S. money so far has been spent on engineering and design work that stayed in the U.S., not on the 500 manufacturing jobs that went to a rural Finnish firm, Valmet Automotive.

"We're not in the business of failing; we're in the business of winning. So we make the right decision for the business," Fisker said. "That's why we went to Finland."

Now the Finns are very nice people, I'm sure-a handsome, hardy folk who make great sardines and have an excellent hockey team.

But carmakers? C'mon, Barry. What gives?

Politics, that's what:

The loan to Fisker is part of a $1 billion bet the Energy Department has made in two politically connected California-based electric carmakers producing sporty -- and pricey -- cutting-edge autos. Fisker Automotive, backed by a powerhouse venture capital firm whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore, predicts it will eventually be churning out tens of thousands of electric sports sedans at the shuttered GM factory it bought in Delaware. And Tesla Motors, whose prime backers include PayPal mogul Elon Musk and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, says it will do the same in a massive facility tooling up in Silicon Valley.

Here are some performance details of the Fisker car supplied by blogger Andrew Fox:

I recalled reading that the Federal government had become a major financial partner in Fisker Automotive. That would explain the official rollout taking place in Washington. When I got back to my computer, I looked up the specifics. We the taxpayers are on the hook for more than half a billion dollars, about the same amount that got loaned to Solyndra, another "green manufacturer," before they went bankrupt. At least Solyndra was manufacturing their products in this country, providing American manufacturing jobs (if short-lived jobs), and making a product that average Americans could conceivably afford. Fisker is manufacturing these gorgeous Leonardo DiCaprio toys in Finland. And the kicker, for those of you who would still claim that the risk of half a billion tax dollars is justified by environmental gains... contrary to the company's initial hype, the Karma will only run for thirty-two miles on its electric motors before its turbocharged gasoline engine needs to kick in (as opposed to the initial estimate of fifty miles). Once that occurs, the Karma gets about the same mileage as a Ford Explorer. Not the new Explorer, even. The older, gas-hog, body-on-frame model. We're talking twenty miles per gallon, folks. So much for your "green investment."

And Fox links and comments on this study of Fisker performance from Green Car Reports:

The analysts at Green Car Reports, "the ultimate guide to cleaner, greener driving," worry that the Fisker Karma may discredit the entire Department of Energy loan program. Given that, in a comparison of EPA mileage ratings between the two "American made" (scare quotes present due to the Karma being manufactured in Finland, with its electric motors and batteries being sourced from China) plug-in hybrids now on the market, the Chevrolet Volt and the Fisker Karma, the Volt is "rated at 94 MPGe in electric mode, and 37 mpg on gasoline, with an electric range of 35 miles," whereas the Karma is rated at "54 MPGe in electric mode; 20 mpg in range-extended mode," with an electric range of just 32 miles, they may well be right to worry. Oh, and Fisker conveniently left out that little detail about "20 mpg in range-extended mode" in their press releases sent out in the last few days. Details are for the little people, don't you know...

Also on the list of major investors is Obama advisor John Doerr.

The only "green" Obama and his Democratic cronies care about is cold hard cash, wrested from the taxpayer's purse in service to the president's re-election.

What are we to think about a president and vice president who blow nearly a trillion dollars in borrowed money, accept no responsibility for it and then traverse the nation trying to convince Americans that if we don't spend half that much again, people will die from dilapidated bridges and women will be raped because we can't afford cops?

What business do these two have lecturing anyone about anything, much less the conditions that might ensue if we were not to spend more printed money to pay for things they failed to finance the first time because they misappropriated the funds?

Last month, Obama, stumping for his misnamed "American Jobs Act," told his AstroTurf audience in Raleigh-Durham that "in North Carolina alone, there are 153 structurally deficient bridges that need to be repaired. Four of them are near here, on or around the Beltline. Why would we wait to act until another bridge falls?"

After attempting to scare those in the crowd into believing they were one pylon away from being crushed by a fallen bridge, Department of Transportation engineers and administrators had to mollify residents about the safety of the area's bridges.

Wally Bowman, DOT's division chief for Wake County and six neighboring counties, said, "The key thing is: We don't have any bridges that are about to fall. We don't have any bridge out there that is structurally inadequate, where it cannot handle the traffic. We make sure those bridges stay in a good state of repair."

Obama obviously hadn't bothered to do his due diligence; he just made a false assertion to gin up support for legislation that a number of high-profile congressmen in his own party even reject.

Where's the outrage? Where are the media? Why don't they ask Obama why he's proposing to spend $447 billion on projects that aren't even necessary and trying to scare the public into supporting them?

Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously said that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste," but Obama has taken the maxim to a new level. The enhanced version is: "When all else fails to convince the electorate, fabricate a phony crisis, and fuel it with fear based on lies. Then re-present your proposal as the only antidote."

Obama has used this tactic with almost every major agenda item -- the stimulus package, Obamacare, the financial regulation bill, cap and trade, the federal takeovers of General Motors and Chrysler, all the debt ceiling skirmishes and his demagogic opposition to entitlement reform. Obama deliberately created a panic atmosphere based on an illusion of urgency so intense that even lawmakers wouldn't have time to read the bill, much less debate it, let alone post the bill online sufficiently in advance of congressional floor debate to allow public comment as he promised in his campaign

. Though the underlying problems he portrayed as crises were rarely urgent, his legislative "solutions" converted serious national financial problems into ones that present an existential threat to the nation.

Obama is not alone. His chief deputy, Vice President Joe Biden, has ratcheted up the administration's jobs bill rhetoric another decibel. In Flint, Mich., Biden intimated that the city will have more rapes and murders unless the jobs bill is passed.

"In 2008, when Flint had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city," Biden said. "In 2010, when Flint had only 144 police officers, the murder rate climbed to 65, and rapes -- just to pick two categories -- climbed to 229. In 2011, you now only have 125 shields. God only knows what the numbers will be this year for Flint if we don't rectify it."

Do these people have no shame?

Didn't they assure us that Biden would be our national stimulus cop, someone who would make sure that not a dollar of stimulus money would be wasted? And now they have the audacity to invoke the specter of rape and murder unless more federal money is thrown down ratholes, sent to nonexistent locations with phantom ZIP codes, allocated to ostensibly shovel-ready jobs that do not exist, used as slush money for their political benefactors and union cronies, and spent on research to inquire into the mating habits and sexual preferences of the Borneo walking stick?

It's time these two answered some questions themselves about the colossal waste of federal money they've directed toward the stimulus package, Obamacare, Solyndra, other green projects and scores of other boondoggles.

Until they can give us an honest accounting for their recklessness, they have no standing to be demanding more.

A proposed revision to Freedom of Information Act rules would allow federal agencies to lie to citizens and reporters seeking certain records, telling them the records don’t exist.

The Justice Department has proposed the change as part of a large revision of FOIA rules for federal agencies. Specifically, the rule would direct government agencies who are denying a request under an established FOIA exemption to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist,” rather than citing the relevant exemption.

The proposed rule has alarmed government transparency advocates across the political spectrum, who’ve called it “Orwellian” and say it will “twist” public access to government.

In a public comment regarding the rule change, the ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org, said the move “will dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.”

Anne Weismann, the chief counsel of CREW, said the Justice Department has a legitimate purpose behind the rules: to protect sensitive information about ongoing investigations. However, she said lying about the records “is an overbroad and improper response.”

“The problem is, if you’re a FOIA requester and the agency says they don’t have the records, you have no reason to doubt that,” Weismann said. “But if they cite an exemption, you have the option to sue.”

Those groups have suggested an alternate federal response that would not require any revisions to the rules. “We interpret all or part of your request as a request for records which, if they exist, would not be subject to the disclosure requirements of FOIA pursuant to section 552(c), and we therefore will not process that portion of your request.”

The news is “not surprising, coming from the Obama administration,” said Christopher J. Farrell, director of investigations and research at Judicial Watch.

“The Obama administration is already doing it right now by actively misleading the public concerning White House visitor logs,” Farrell said. “Every day, the Obama administration misrepresents and conceals the true, complete record of who is going in and out of the White House — all the while proclaiming themselves champions of transparency. It’s truly Orwellian. The proposed rule change should be rejected.”

Ads by GoogleIf the rule were to go into effect, it would likely be challenged in court. Courts have traditionally given the Justice Department fairly broad powers regarding records disclosure, but recent precedent may give the DOJ trouble.

In a case involving the FBI and records disclosure, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the “Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.”

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue a denial saying it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records. Such a denial is known as a “Glomar response” — named after the legal battle between the Los Angeles Times and the CIA in the 1970s over records concerning the CIA’s attempts to salvage a sunken Soviet submarine.

Upon taking office, President Obama released a memorandum declaring his administration was “committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness. Specifically, he pledged to bolster the strength of the FOIA act, calling it “the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government.”

President Obama just soared to the top of the U.S. embassy bestseller list.

The U.S. Department of State forked over $70,000 to buy Obama’s best-selling book “Dreams From My Father,” The Washington Times reported Tuesday, noting that if Obama earned 10 percent of the purchase, he pocketed several thousand dollars.

Although the 1995 book is a bestseller that sold briskly when Obama’s popularity grew during his run for president, the department’s decision to buy copies is catching the eye of government spending watchdogs.

“It’s inappropriate for U.S. taxpayer dollars to be spent on this,” Leslie Paige, the spokesman for Citizens Agaisnt Governtment Waste, told the paper. “This sounds like propaganda.”

The report points out that there’s no indication that the White House was alerted about the purchase, and a spokesman from the State Department said book purchases are common and often used “to engage key audiences in discussions of foreign policy.”

“We also provide key library collections with books about the United States,” Noel Clay, the spokesman, told The Times. (The newspaper said a White House spokesman didn't respond to its messages.)

Obama reported between $1 million to $5 million in royalties in 2010 for “Dreams from My Father,” and between $100,001 and $1 million for “The Audacity of Hope.”

A stated aim of the Obama-Reid jobs bill is to preserve the “competitive edge” that our “world-class” education system purportedly gives us. In an attempt to do that it would throw tens of billions of extra taxpayer dollars at public school employees.

A few problems with that: we’re not educationally world-class; we don’t have a competitive edge in k-12 education; and this bill would actually push the U.S. economy closer to a Greek-style economic disaster.

First, the belief that increasing public school employment helps students learn is demonstrably false. Over the past forty years, public school employment has grown 10 times faster than enrollment. If more teachers union jobs were going to boost student achievement, we’d have seen it by now. We haven’t. Achievement at the end of high school has been flat in reading and math and has declined in science over this period. I documented these facts the last time Democrats decided to stimulate their teachers union base, just one year and $10 billion ago.

So what has our public school hiring binge done for us? Since 1980, it has raised the cost of sending a child from Kindergarten through the 12th grade by $75,000 — doubling it to around $150,000, in 2009 dollars.

And what would going back to the staff-to-student ratio of 1980 do? It would save taxpayers over $140 billion annually.

But don’t those school employees need jobs? Of course they do. But we can’t afford to keep paying for millions of phony-baloney state jobs that have no impact on student learning. We need these men and women working in the productive sector of the economy — the free enterprise sector — so that they contribute to economic growth instead of being a fiscal anchor that drags us ever closer to the bottom of the Aegean. Freeing up the $140 billion currently squandered by the state schools would provide the resources to create those productive private sector jobs.

Continuing to tax the American people to sustain or even expand the current bloat, as Obama and Reid want to do, cripples our economic growth prospects by warehousing millions of potentially productive workers in unproductive jobs. The longer we do that, the slimmer our chances of economic recovery become. This Obama-Reid bill is such an incredibly bad idea, so obviously bad, that it is hard to imagine any remotely well-informed policymaker supporting it… unless, of course, they think the short term good will of public school employee unions is more important than the long-term prosperity of the American people.

With his latest pseudo-compassionate expansion of the student loan program, President Obama reminds us why we ask whether he is simply unable to learn from history or he is indifferent to government waste incurred in pursuit of "good intentions."

Back when Obama was trolling for illusory savings to manipulate Congressional Budget Office scorekeepers into decreeing that Obamacare would be revenue-neutral, he proposed the ingenious scheme whereby the federal government would subsume 100 percent of the student loan industry and eliminate evil private-sector profits going to "middlemen."

The plan was a smorgasbord for big-government enthusiasts because it envisioned whacking private business, legislative trickery and growing the government in numerous ways. It wouldn't just allow the government to seize financial business in grand fascist style; it also gave Obama an excuse to expand the existing loan program.

By calculating $60 billion in savings over the next decade, Obama gleefully inflated student loans by $40 billion and boasted that he still had $20 billion left over to count toward reconciling the balance sheet on his grossly over-budgeted national health care bill.

Obama smuggled this student loan legislation into the Obamacare bill because it probably never would have otherwise attracted the 60 needed votes to pass on its own. Such relatively small-potatoes legislation, by itself, wouldn't have supported the bribes Obama used to cram through Obamacare.

One such Obamacare bribe, included in the student loan section of the bill, was a hidden payoff to North Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. The bill established, in the words of the CBO, "a new program for lenders who were chartered before July 1, 2009, and are owned by a state under the control of a board including the governor and offered guaranteed loans prior to June 30, 2010." This was crafted to apply to just one lender: the Bank of North Dakota. So much for open, honest government.

If all this weren't offensive enough, the Obama administration initiated the process to transition toward the new student loan program some six months before the bill passed. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent letters pressuring colleges and universities to prepare for the transition, even though many were reluctant and had chosen private lenders over the government option for a reason.

Fast-forward to the present and Obama, by executive fiat, is finessing a regulatory end run around Congress to allow student debtors to refinance and consolidate loans on more favorable terms, capping student loan repayment rates at 10 percent of the portion of a debtor's income that goes above the poverty line, and limiting the life of a loan to 20 years.

You don't need to be a math wizard to understand that this is just a slick way of forcing taxpayers to take a bigger hit by increasing the number of loans that will never be fully repaid, yet another redistribution of wealth from our Marxist in chief. Nor do you need to be a clinical psychologist to grasp that our government is teaching young adults how to be financially irresponsible with impunity.

Never worried about long-term consequences, Obama is either oblivious to (highly unlikely) or unconcerned with the likelihood that his actions will contribute to the expansion of a growing college debt bubble that economists warn could be analogous to the financial collapse-inducing housing bubble. Just as with the housing bubble, these unrealistically priced loans artificially increase the amount of money being spent on education, which will result in universities raising their prices. Research by Richard Vedder shows there is a direct correlation between increasing student "aid" and increased college tuition costs.

Guess who will be hit the hardest? The middle class Obama purports to care so much about, who will have to pay more for school and, in some cases, enter the student loan program themselves, further driving up costs.

Adding insult to injury, Obama tells us that we should be grateful for his magnanimity. Students not only are getting free money but also, with their refinanced loans, will have extra gazillions to spend and stimulate the economy he claims is being held back by obstructionist Republican congressmen for partisan purposes.

But guess how much extra dough Obama's largesse will generate for the average student borrower? If you guessed $9 per month, you overestimated by a dollar. As HotAir's Ed Morrissey points out, Obama's Making Work Pay tax cut added about $8 per (SET ITAL) week (END ITAL) to the paychecks of (SET ITAL) all (END ITAL) workers in the U.S. for more than 2 1/2 years, which hardly stimulated anything.

Almost everything about this plan is wrongheaded and destructive, but Obama expects props for caring for these students. Well, I'm all for passing the love around, but wouldn't it be nice if he heaped some of it on the United States of America?

I also have another issue with this that the article doesn't address. When college tuitions rise, unionized professor's salaries and dues increase. These increased union dues are then donated to Democratic Party election campaigns. See how that works?

President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).

To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees.

Acting Administrator Shipman had the temerity to say the 15-cent mandatory Christmas tree fee “is not a tax nor does it yield revenue for the Federal government” (76 CFR 69102). The Federal government mandates that the Christmas tree sellers pay the 15-cents per tree, whether they want to or not. The Federal government directs that the revenue generated by the 15-cent fee goes to the Board appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture to carry out the Christmas tree program established by the Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. President, that’s a new 15-cent tax to pay for a Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

Nobody is saying President Obama doesn’t have authority to impose his new Christmas Tree Tax — his Administration cites the Commodity Promotion, Research and Information Act of 1996. Just because the Obama Administration has the legal power to impose its Christmas Tree Tax doesn’t mean it should do so.

The economy is barely growing and nine percent of the American people have no jobs. Is a new tax on Christmas trees the best President Obama can do?

And, by the way, the American Christmas tree has a great image that doesn’t need any help from the government.

This might be the most blatant corruption from the Obama Administration yet:

LA Times wrote:

Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug dealA company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist.November 13, 2011

Reporting from Washington— Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.

Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world's richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company's financial demands, senior officials replaced the government's lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.

When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.

Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a "sole-source" procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation's biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government's specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.

Nov 12, 2011 1:30 PM EST Where did green-energy money go? Straight to campaign donors. Read more about Peter Schwiezer and his book Throw Them All Out in the new Newsweek on sale Monday.

When President-elect Obama came to Washington in late 2008, he was outspoken about the need for an economic stimulus to revive a struggling economy. He wanted billions of dollars spent on “shovel-ready projects” to build roads; billions more for developing alternative-energy projects; and additional billions for expanding broadband Internet access and creating a “smart grid” for energy consumption. After he was sworn in as president, he proclaimed that taxpayer money would assuredly not be doled out to political friends. “Decisions about how Recovery Act dollars are spent will be based on the merits,” he said, referring to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. “Let me repeat that: decisions about how recovery money will be spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists.”

Really?

It would take an entire book to analyze every single grant and government-backed loan doled out since Barack Obama became president. But an examination of grants and guaranteed loans offered by just one stimulus program run by the Department of Energy, for alternative-energy projects, is stunning. The so-called 1705 Loan Guarantee Program and the 1603 Grant Program channeled billions of dollars to all sorts of energy companies. The grants were earmarked for alternative-fuel and green-power projects, so it would not be a surprise to learn that those industries were led by liberals. Furthermore, these were highly competitive grant and loan programs—not usually a hallmark of cronyism. Often fewer than 10 percent of applicants were deemed worthy.

Nevertheless, a large proportion of the winners were companies with Obama-campaign connections. Indeed, at least 10 members of Obama’s finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting your money. At the same time, several politicians who supported Obama managed to strike gold by launching alternative-energy companies and obtaining grants. How much did they get? According to the Department of Energy’s own numbers ... a lot. In the 1705 government-backed-loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.

These government grants and loan guarantees not only provided access to taxpayer capital. They also served as a seal of approval from the federal government. Taxpayer money creates what investors call a “halo effect,” in which a young, unprofitable company is suddenly seen to have a glowing future. The plan is simple. Invest some money, secure taxpayer grants and loans, go public, and then cash out. In just one small example, a company called Amyris Biotechnologies received a $24 million DOE grant to build a pilot plant to use altered yeast to turn sugar into hydrocarbons. The investors included several Obama bundlers and fundraisers. With federal money in hand, Amyris went public with an IPO the following year, raising $85 million. Kleiner Perkins, a firm that boasts Obama financier John Doerr and former vice president Al Gore as partners, found its $16 million investment was now worth $69 million. It’s not clear how the other investors did. Amyris continues to lose money. Meanwhile, the $24 million grant created 40 jobs, according to the government website recovery.gov.

One might think that the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, which has doled out billions in taxpayer-guaranteed loans, would be directed by a dedicated scientist or engineer. Or perhaps a civil servant with considerable financial knowledge. Instead, the department’s loan and grant programs are run by partisans who were responsible for raising money during the Obama campaign from the same people who later came to seek government loans and grants. Steve Spinner, who served on the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee and was a bundler himself, was the campaign’s “liaison to Silicon Valley.” His responsibilities included fundraising, recruiting more bundlers, and managing Obama’s relationship with a cadre of very wealthy donors. After the 2008 campaign, Spinner joined the Department of Energy as the “chief strategic operations officer” for the loan programs. A lot of the money he helped hand out went to that same cadre of wealthy Silicon Valley campaign donors. He also sat on the White House Business Council, which is made up of Obama-supporting corporate executives.

Another Obama fundraiser positioned to lead the allocation of taxpayer money to Obama contributors was Sanjay Wagle, who served as the managing co-chairman of Cleantech & Green Business Leaders for Obama. Wagle’s day job was as a principal at VantagePoint Venture Partners. After the 2008 election, Wagle joined the Obama administration as a “renewable energy grants adviser” at the Department of Energy. VantagePoint owned firms that would later see federal loan guarantees roll in.

Jonathan Silver, who would serve as director of the loan programs, had worked in the Clinton administration, first as counselor to the secretary of the interior and later as assistant deputy secretary in the Department of Commerce. Silver’s wife has served as financial director of the Democratic Leadership Council. His business partner, Tom Wheeler, was an Obama bundler, and Wheeler’s wife was an outreach coordinator for the campaign. Silver’s “strategic adviser” was Steve Spinner.

The grants themselves originated in the office of Cathy Zoi, who served as the assistant secretary of energy for efficiency and renewable energy. (Wagle was her adviser.) Zoi had previously worked in the Clinton White House as the chief of staff on environmental policy, then as the CEO of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. You may be thinking, “So what? Why would we expect anything less of political appointees?” But the numbers don’t lie: the recipients of loans and grants were, overwhelmingly, Obama cronies.

The Government Accountability Office has been highly critical of the way guaranteed loans and grants were doled out by the Department of Energy, complaining that the process appears “arbitrary” and lacks transparency. In March 2011, for example, the GAO examined the first 18 loans that were approved and found that none were properly documented. It also noted that officials “did not always record the results of analysis” of these applications. A loan program for electric cars, for example, “lacks performance measures.” No notes were kept during the review process, so it is difficult to determine how loan decisions were made. The GAO further declared that the Department of Energy “had treated applicants inconsistently in the application review process, favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.” The Department of Energy’s inspector general, Gregory Friedman, who was not a political appointee, chastised the alternative-energy loan and grant programs for their absence of “sufficient transparency and accountability.” He has testified that contracts have been steered to “friends and family.”

Friends indeed. These programs might be the greatest—and most expensive—example of crony capitalism in American history. Tens of billions of dollars went to firms controlled or owned by fundraisers, bundlers, and political allies, many of whom—surprise!—are now raising money for Obama again.

Obama: A Prophet Without Honor in His Own Land Peter Wehner 11.15.2011 - 2:00 PM

President Obama has decided to go for the hat-trick.

In September, Obama told an interviewer Americans have “gotten a little soft.” That was followed by a fundraiser in San Francisco where Obama said that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” And over the weekend at an APEC conference in Honolulu, speaking to CEOs, President Obama said this: “But you know we’ve been a little bit lazy I think over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken it for granted – ‘Well, people will want to come here’ — and we’re not out there hungry selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America.”

Set aside the fact that Obama bears a good deal of the responsibility for making America unattractive to new businesses. Set aside the fact that Obama’s opinion of America seems to track with America’s opinion of Obama. (When Obama was elected president by a comfortable margin in 2008, we were the ones we had been waiting for; today, with Obama’s public approval ratings at dangerously low levels, we’re a little soft, a little bit lazy, and lost our ambition and imagination). And set aside the political wisdom of taking monthly jabs at the American people.

What we’re learning about Obama, I think, is that the most authentic words he uttered during the 2008 campaign were words he wanted to keep private.

In April of that year Obama, speaking at what he thought was a private fundraiser in San Francisco,was trying to explain his troubles winning over some working-class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions. “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

It’s all there, in a single sentence. The barely concealed disdain for the American people. The reflexive need to explain his lack of popularity based on the unenlightened views and moral defects of the masses. The insufferable moral superiority. Obama seems to believe the attitude of the American people to him should be the same as Wayne and Garth (of “Wayne’s World” fame) toward Alice Cooper: “We’re not worthy. We’re not worthy.”

It must be frustrating to be president of a nation of people whom you look down on and for whom you have contempt. The good news for Obama is this problem may well be rectified round about a year from now. And if the president is rejected by the public after his first term and judged to have been a failure, we can already anticipate the title of his third autobiography: “A Prophet Without Honor in His Own Land.”

For some reason, Barack Obama has decided that part of his path to re-election will involve blaming his failures on the American people, who can be insulted into loving him again. This narrative involves convincing us that the American spirit was so degenerate by 2008 that not even the dazzling skills of the LIghtworker could save us… at least, not in a mere four years.

In September, Obama declared that it was his unhappy duty to preside over “a great, great country that has gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades” during an interview in Orlando. Then it was off to San Francisco, where he told the audience at one of his endless big-bucks campaign fundraisers that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam.”

Last weekend Obama was at it again, taking time away from golf with an old friend who was busted on prostitution charges to tell a gathering of business executives that he’s still very disappointed in the sloth of the unworthy nation that has been making him look bad, by failing to live up to his expectations. As related by ABC News:

Obama told a group of CEOs today that the United States has gotten “lazy” and that America lost its hunger in promoting itself in a global marketplace.

“We’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — ‘Well, people would want to come here’ — and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America,” he told the CEOs who are gathered on the sidelines of the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings, which the United States is hosting this year in Hawaii.

“I think it’s important to remember that the United States is still the largest recipient of foreign investment in the world and there are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity — our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture,” he said.

“No one is asking him to go out there and to be a jingoistic cheerleader,” Krauthammer said. “But when you call your own country ‘lazy’ when you are abroad, and call it ‘unambitious and soft’ when you are home, I think what you are showing is not tough love, but ill-conceived, ill-concealed contempt.”

Krauthammer then blamed Obama, rather than the American people, for the poor state of the economy.

“Look: Why are people reluctant to invest?” he asked. “We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world — in the industrialized world. Obama has spoken about it. It’s the one issue on which the Republicans would have agreed on lowering that rate, eliminating the loopholes. And in three years in office, he has done nothing.”

Krauthamer also directed blame toward the National Labor Relations Board​, charging the agency with “trying to shut down a $1 billion plant that was constructed as a favor to Obama union allies.”

“People look abroad and say, ‘This isn’t a place I want to do business,’” Krauthammer huffed. ”It’s his issues, his overregulation, over-taxation and all the red tape he has added. And now he blames Americans’ laziness? I think it’s unseemly.”

(Emphases mine.) Our bloated federal government was already quite good at suppressing business growth before Barack Obama came along to teach it a few new tricks, and turn a temporary recession into a semi-permanent depression. For the greatest big-spending, hyper-regulating job killer of the modern era to pin his failures on the suffocated private sector is, indeed, most unseemly. A nation that would fall for this insulting sales pitch is well and truly doomed.

I have one bone to pick with Krauthammer’s analysis, however. Why shouldn’t we expect the President to “go out there and be a jingoistic cheerleader?” Who should we expect to sing our praises, if not our President? Granted that it could be overdone, but it’s been a while since we enjoyed the humble and uplifting regard of a leader like Ronald Reagan​, who stood in awe of the mighty nation that chose to place him in the Oval Office. Reagan knew he couldn’t see the best parts of America from the White House window, and never tired of letting them know how much he’d like to drop by for a visit.

We have a lazy and incompetent government. The belief that piles of taxpayer money can solve any problem, by purchasing a first-class bureaucracy to generate a blizzard of official paperwork, is inherently lazy. The childish belief that America is pockmarked with problems only government can address, and only spending from Washington counts as “caring” about an issue, is the laziest belief a person could possibly have. Supplication is easy: just open your mouth and wait for it to be filled.

Obamanomics is based on the ironclad belief that government knows best, and has a sacred responsibility to strike down incorrect judgments from the free market. Of course someone who thinks that way won’t be much of a “cheerleader” for the economic liberty his hapless people cannot be entrusted with. On the other hand, someone who holds the health opposite of Obama’s beliefs can’t help but have stars in their eyes when they look upon their marvelous nation.

It will be great to shove Obama and his government out of the way next year, and teach him just how wrong he is about the United States of America.

This afternoon, the US reached $15 Trillion in debt. Prior to this sorry excuse for a president socialist scumbag assuming office on January 20th, 2009, the US had $10,626,877,048,913 worth of debt from all previous presidents combined. In less than three years, this evil Marxist prick has added another $4.4 Trillion. This is inexcusable and a disgrace.